Google Chrome Prints Blank Pages from Google Sheets

You have worked and worked on a spreadsheet or document in Google Sheets or Google Docs (and probably every other GSuite component). You’re finally ready to print and you hit Print, then Next and… BLANK!

This is incredibly aggravating and judging from the articles around the web has dozens of causes. None of the solutions worked for me.

What did?

Solution 1: Set PDF behavior to Open rather than Download

In Chrome, go to Settings > Advanced > Privacy and Security > Content. Under Content, down near the bottom select PDF and then turn on the option to “Download PDF files instead of automatically opening them in Chrome.”

This is still a hassle, because I don’t actually want PDFs to download and open in the system viewer, but at least I can print from Chrome.

Solution 2: Use Firefox

Oh the irony… to use GSuite, I have to switch to Firefox. Go figure, but it works 100% of the time.

Solution 3: Enable the new Print Preview UI?

As of this release of Chrome (Chrome 65.lots.of.numbers), there is an experimental new print preview UI. To enable it, you go to chrome://flags (i.e. you enter that in the address bar) and enter “preview” in the search box to narrow it down to a reasonable number of items.

Now find “Enable new Print Preview UI” and set it to enabled. Relaunch and see what happens.

In my case, what happened the first time (running Chrome 64) is the tab locked up and the printer was defined as Foo Printer, PrinterBrandAA 12345. Only way out of it is to close the tab.

Then I upgraded to Chrome 65 and it looked like it had worked — go to Sheets, randomly create a spreadsheet from one of the templates (Time Sheet), print, click Next, get to the print preview and it’s not blank. It’s all looking good now!

But then it turns out that I still can’t do things like cancel, access the advanced settings or change printers. But I hit print and it says “Printing…” and it looks promising… except that nothing happens and the tab locks up and I have to close it. Still, it kinda sorta feels like it might work in Chrome 66 or Chrome 67. So if you’re reading this anytime after say, May 2018, it’s probably worth a try.

Appendix: The problem in pictures

Here’s a visual on the problem. First I hit Print and get to the GSuite print setup and all looks good:

But alas! When you click Next and go to the Chrome print preview, it’s blank.